You can challenge anyone to an unarmed brawl. If they accept, don't take your turn; instead, wait until it's their turn, and play rock-paper-scissors against them to determine the winner.

ROCK: Punch. If the punch damage reduces them to 0 HP, they're knocked unconscious. Some weapons like brass knuckles can be used to increase your punch damage, but I'd say the base is d3. In a tie, the one with the highest strength wins.

PAPER: Dodge. You must move, and you can perform one non-combat action (Picking up something, pulling a lever, pushing over a bookshelf, etc. It can still hurt a dude, as long as you don't touch them directly.) In a tie, the one with the highest dexterity wins.

SCISSORS: Grab. Only lasts for the turn. You can throw them as far as your Strength modifier in meters, or disarm them of a weapon or item. When disarmed, the weapon will clatter to the ground a few squares away (They can use a dodge action to pick it back up). In a tie, the one with the highest constitution wins.

Any attack against someone who's in the middle of a brawl will hit the other brawler if it misses. This means it's mostly in your interests to leave this Mano-e-mano. If the enemy does not accept your challenge (Or if they're surprised), then you keep in turn order: You punch, dodge or grab for free, and they take their turn as normal when it rolls around.

Implications:

Yomi - "Reading the mind of your opponent" - makes this into more of a mind-game than a dice roll. You need to judge whether your opponent wants to punch, dodge or grab, then do the opposite. Now, tie breakers are very powerful: They let you win two out of three match-ups. But wait; if the DM knows how strong you are at grabbing, then he'll use a punch - or does he know that you know that he knows?

Grabbing and disarming an opponent influences this yomi, by making the opponent predictable; You know they'll probably want to dodge, so that they can pick up their weapon.

We had a fight near a cliff edge, and one of my players wanted to throw a guy off. However, when the Brawl turn came around, he'd figured out that I knew he wanted to throw a guy off, so he went for a punch. But I knew that he was going to realize that, so I craftily went for a dodge. What I didn't realize is that the bad guy was packed in. The only place he could dodge was straight off the cliff and down to his death.

That tension of suspending your turn until the enemy's turn rolls around is fantastic. While the others take their actions, you're looking across at the DM and pondering your next move.

Edit:

Colossus-Climbing rules

If you grab a large creature, you can climb up them. You can do this once for something giant-sized, twice or more if it's bigger. This gives you an extra dice of damage: d4 after one climb, d6, d8 and so on if you climb higher. If either you or the colossus dodges, you'll fall off.

So you see, you want to attack, but you'll need to grab on if the colossus tries to shake you off with a dodge.

Super exciting news today, friends and followers. Matt Rundle and I are making a book called Dangertopia, building off the back of my old encounter tables to make a complete kit for every kind of wilderness travel you could need. We're releasing a part of it today, now, for free.

Insect Hell! The most dangerous of the five deadly swamp zones. Your PC's are likely to leave diseased, infested and dead. Roll on the left table to get encounters for every day you're traveling. On a 10 or under, the party will have a faction encounter on top of the normal one. Encounter the Soldier the first time you roll it, Elites the second time, and the Leader the third time.

If you like this, the most amazing thing you could do is playtest it and talk about it. Write about it here or on your blog, run a game at your table or on Google+; a full recorded session of people playing this would be orgasmic. Tell us how useful this thing is to you, and how we could make it better.

The full book will have five of these zones for each different type of wilderness: Forest, desert, arctic, jungle, swamp, and (maybe) ocean. Life is weird, and we can't promise that either or both of us won't spontaneously combust and be unable to complete the entire project. Still, we're currently planning to sell every different type wilderness as it's own PDF as we finish it, then collect them all together in a single book. Whatever happens, we should release the full swamp sometime next month.

I've been playing X-Com lately. You control 14 dudes as they die, panic, succumb to alien mind control and turn into zombies. At the end of a mission you level up the survivors and buy another crateload of rookies. Death is constant and hard to anticipate, so a lot of the strategy revolves around sending in the cannon-fodder rookies to protect the guys you care about.

It's interesting, because as far as I can tell early D&D worked the same way. A lot of the traps in the DMG seem totally ridiculous for the current fashion of ~4 PC's. Save or Die effects, level drain, diseases - Matt's poor PC died to Rotgrubs in a single turn, before he had any way to tell what was happening or how to stop it. These things only really make sense if you have 10+ PC's, with some hirelings for good measure.

(You'll have to excuse me if I'm reiterating stuff everybody knows. D&D is still a strange new land to me.)

Creating 10 normal characters and trying to keep track of the results would take hours and drive me insane. So, here's an experiment: Jack McNamee's 10 Second System (Matt helped).
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Roll oned6 for each starting ability score, then roll an occupation and starting equipment (You can use this DCC character generator for those). Your starting character is finished.

Dret thiefton turned out to be only average at thief skills. His parents will be shattered.

Here's what the scores mean.

Strength: The weapons you can use. Whenever the PC's find a weapon, rate it out of ten; you need that much strength to wield it. Bonuses to damage and to-hit are inherent in the weapons you find, rather than something you earn as you level up. Roll under it on a d10 for strength checks.

Constitution: The hit dice you get whenever you level up. Roll under it for fort saves.

Dexterity: Skill checks and reflex saves. Whenever a PC needs to make a skill check, rate the task: 5 for trivial tasks, 10 for normal tasks, 15 for hard and 20 for impossible. Your dexterity shows which dice you roll for it; d6 to d20+10. At 1 dex, you cannot perform any kind of skill checks.

You can learn skills from expert thieves. If you haven't been trained in a skill, use 1 less dex when rolling for it. If Dret Thiefton has 3 dex, he'll roll a d6 instead of a d10 for any skill he hasn't trained in.

You can use any skill list you want, or just use the DCC list: Backstab, Sneak, Hide, Pickpocket, Climb, Locks, Find traps, Disable traps, Forge, Disguise, Read Languages, Poison, Cast spell from scroll.

Intelligence: Which spells you can learn, and will saves. Whenever the PC's find a spell, rate it out of ten; you need that much intelligence to cast it.

Intelligence applies to both Wizard Spells and Cleric Spells. You go to a wizard to learn spells from the Wizard list, and a Cleric to learn spells from the Cleric list. They hate each other, and they'll want you to become one of them before they'll teach you the better spells. You could obviously cheat them to learn both.

Wisdom: The number of spells you can hold in your brain at once. Vancian rules. Roll under for Perception checks.

Charisma: Which Hirelings you can get. Hirelings can be level 1 to 10; that's how much charisma you need to hire them. At 5 Cha, you can hire level 5 guys. High level hirelings will also have better equipment, and may know some skills or spells. Roll under it for a morale check to stop your hirelings panicking or stabbing you in the back.

Every time you level up, you get one hit dice of HP and one extra point of ability score to allocate wherever you want. Max level is 10.

The system assumes every player will have 2-4 PC's. You get 2-4 new PC's when the last PC from your old batch dies - until then you have to rely on hirelings to restock.
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So, most of the traditional leveling up choices occur in the world. You have to find spells and skills, instead of being abstractly given those things when you level up. This is partially inspired by the old D&D ideas to that effect, and partially inspired by the way Dark Souls and X-Com work. Your PC is defined by the things they have, and their stats define the things they can have.

It's fast as lightning and completely classless. It's not going to be for everyone. I'll try running it on Monday, I'm excited to see if it works. Tell me what you think in the comments..

Here's a way to incorporate the Caste System into your game, ruthlessly stolen from the brilliant Small but Vicious Dog and tweaked to add some heft to Charisma. There are 8 ranks in the Caste System:

8. Queens, Kings, and Heirs. Anyone with a right to the throne.

7. Lords, Barons and Titled Gentry; the highest rank you can possibly be without being born into royalty. Own all the land.
6. Nobles, Aristocrats and Knights. Oversee the land for the lords.
5. Shopkeepers, wealthy merchants - anyone rich who had to work for their money.
4. Freemen. Commoners who can choose where they go.
3. Villeins: Peasants, commoners, laborers. The vast majority, working the land as slaves to a Lord. They are forbidden from leaving their lord's land.
2. Lepers, beggars and guttersnipes. Loathed, but tolerated. Will not be allowed in most places.
1. Witches, devil-spawn, and mutants. Will be killed or chased from any major city or town if seen.

A PC is normally Rank 4, a Freemen; low class peasants who can still choose to go where they like.
Your Charisma modifier effects your rank. +3 elevates you to a Rank 7 Lord, -3 makes you an ostracized freak. You also get + or - one dice worth of starting money per point of charisma mod. You gain rank naturally every three levels or so, but you can also move up and down ranks through your actions.

Pulling rank

The social demands of caste-system etiquette are subtle and complex. You can fuck with anyone below you.

One rank below you: You can ignore anything they say. They must give a good reason for disobeying any orders, or you're allowed to inflict any kind of non-painful punishment on them.Two ranks below you: They must follow your orders. You can inflict any kind of non-lethal punishment on them for disobeying..Three ranks or more below you: You can kill them without any legal ramifications or comment. They must follow any order, to death and beyond.

The same applies in reverse; don't fuck with anyone above you, or they could start throwing out punishments. The system is only enforced socially, obviously. Deep in the wilderness, outside of society, it's easy for the underlings to realize that you're just a weak man in a funny hat.

Unless you go a step further and use;

Divine Right

You aren't just a lord because your dad was a lord; you're a lord because God put you there. The medieval point of view is literally true in all aspects: The caste system is enforced by the universe, and nobles actually are better than peasants in every way.

When fighting someone of a different rank, find the difference between your ranks. Whoever's the highest rank gets +the difference to every relevant roll: To-hit, saves, damage, grapple checks, everything. The lowest rank gets -the difference to every roll.

So, if Graunch the Leper tried to take a bite out of King George, Graunch would be rolling at -6 to everything, while the King would get +6 to everything. This doesn't apply to anyone who doesn't care about the caste system.

A statement of intent: I'm not using these rules to stop my PC's fucking with high-level NPC's. I assume they'll still be constantly toppling governments like always. What I'm going for here is a way to give your Charisma score some serious social weight without forcing people to make Cha checks instead of roleplaying.

With these rules, a high Cha makes you a force to be reckoned with in the city, and a low Cha could make you flee from any nobles you see. It even has hireling implications: You can order anyone three ranks below you to come on an adventure, whether they like it or not. Lepers or Peasants will be terrible at fighting, obviously: You'll still need to shell out coin for the good fighters. But being able to order up a mob on demand is pretty neat.

I like the idea of level drain. It's like taking bites out of your soul. It makes any enemy, no matter how goofy, into a terrifying thing that you never, ever want to fight, or go near, or look at. It sends the message: "There is nothing you have that I can't take."

But jeeze, that book-keeping. There's way too much fiddling around to consider going up or down levels in the middle of a fight.

Dark Souls - the best D&D videogame - has some great alternatives.

Curse

Your max HP is halved. How simple is that? Keep track of what your max HP was, and keep increasing that as normal as you level up, but you can never have more than half of that. Season to taste. The sadist DM may wish to allow players to be double or triple cursed to 1/4th or 1/8th of HP.

Curses are generally inflicted by Basilisks, which obviously look like this:

Also known as "Curse Frogs," these guys puff up their throats and spew cursed smoke everywhere. 1, 2, or 3 saves before you are cursed, according to taste. Anyone who is cursed will immediately solidify as a jagged stone statue, returning the next morning as a shivering wreck. These statues will be littered around any place where Curse monsters live.

The Accursed are the only ones who can harm ghosts. In the middle of ghost towns, you can find men who will take away curses. Curses can never be lifted - only transferred onto someone else.

Infest

Your head sprouts egg-sacks. The creature inside will devour half the XP you earn from now on. Every time you level up, it will too, growing and hatching into... well, you're the DM. Use my worm table for inspiration if you want.

This malady is generally inflicted by the egg-burdened servants of Chaos Witch Quelaag.

They'll grab your legs, and their maggots will infest your head. If you receive their sacred burden their leader will welcome you as one of their own, and he has much sorcery to teach. They may even have a cure, though they consider the idea the vilest heresy.

Every time my players go to buy weapons, I drag out the equipment list and they spend half an hour deciding which of the 10 weapons and armors that exist in the world they want to use. I've always wanted to recreate the fantastic variety of weapons in games like Dark Souls, but make that equipment list any longer and we'd be looking through it for hours.

Anyone selling weapons has about 1d4 of the weapons below for sale. Roll a d10 for the middle of nowhere, d20 for a normal town, and d50 for the big city. The number you rolled is also how much it costs.

Some weapon rules: For ranged weapons, Short range is the size of a dungeon room, medium range is about the size of a football field, long range is anything you can see (At DM's digression). Some weapons on this list have stat requirements, like "Requires +2 str". Anyone who doesn't have that stat can still use the weapon, but they'll critically fail on a 5 or less.

Blowgun, d4, short range. The darts can be loaded with all sorts of poisons.

Shortsword, d6.

Hand axe. D6, critical damage against all wood/plants.

Throwing daggers. D4/d10, short range, D8 per pack.

Net. Two-handed. On a successful hit, victim makes a strength check or is captured.

Light crossbow, d6. Short range.

Shortbow. D6 damage. Two-handed. Medium range.

Longsword. D8, two-handed.

Heavy crossbow, d8. Short range.

Black firebombs. D6, d6 fire damage ongoing. d4 per pack.

Halberd. D8, two-handed, long weapon can hit enemies from a small distance away.

Claw gauntlets. Wolverine claws. D6, can use while taking two move actions.

Carim Parrying dagger, d4. Use in your off-hand while wielding another weapon. Against sword-wielding enemies, you can ready an action to Parry: Dex check to sweep aside their attack and do backstab damage.

God Hand. Cestus marked with banishment symbols. D6, knocks enemies back a large distance, can be held while wielding other weapons.

Spiked shield. D6 damage, +1 AC.

Pike. D8, two-handed, can hit anyone at short bow range, but can't hit anyone that's right up in your grill.

I haven't updated this blog for a while; fever, university, work and life, you know how it is. BUT, I'm currently working on a project with my good friend Matt Rundle: An expansion of the encounter tables I've posted here into some kind of complete wilderness kit. The plan is, it'll have everything you need to run adventures travelling across swamps, forests, jungles, the arctic tundra, seas, deserts, savannahs, and mountains. Each of these biomes is going to have

-6 Towns
-6 factions
-5 different zones. So, the swamp is split into 5 different types of swamp, each with their own encounter table, most with their own rules for movement. One zone is Insect Hell, for example: stagnant water, if you get submerged in it you get infected with horrifying insects. The idea is Verisimilitude, right? So you're not just hovering across a tract of land labelled generic "Swamp". Also, you can just drag and drop in individual zones, so one of them has to be the kind of swamp you're looking for.
-Ready-made hex crawl map.

A hex crawl map resembling the very map below? Possibly!

The cover will be a hex map that unites every zone into one big world. Dangertopia! A riddle and a curse!

Rupert Coldsing. Twelve year old chain smoker, travelling alone, turned out to be an expert on defusing bombs. By finding this bible verse, deciphering a code, and hacking into the frequency of his secret radio, the gang discovering that he was a secret agent of communist-nazi spy agency Leviathan, working together with

Lokman Yilmaz, Turkish hypnotist and master of illusion. Both he and Rupert were working together to hunt down whoever stole the Key to Shangri-la from Leviathan. Lokman and Rupert were threatening

Count Frumpenshire Hamffleswain, famedShakespearean actor, surrounded by silent servants with sewn-up waistcoats. The count had some bad debts, and was on his way to pick up his inheritance in Istanbul when Leviathan tracked him down. He was fine at first, but started to sweat after the murder of his personal friend,

Francis Depardue, suicidal French artist. From the occult symbolism of his paintings, the teen team deduced that both he and the count worshipped the same ancient, forgotten volcano god. Deeply depressed at the death of his religion, Depardue said this would be his last journey - so why was he found stabbed with his own ceremonial dagger? The culprit was taller than him - which means it was either Lokman, the Count, or

Beatrice von Trumpleshlize, obsessive german monkey collector. After stealing the Key of Shangri-la, she was fleeing on the train with her husband:

Marco Catione, mild-mannered Italian priest and secret ice robot from another dimension. On a hunch, the teens burst into his cabin and interrogated him. Believing they worked for Leviathan, he revealed his true form and froze one of the teens solid. With some home-made explosives the gang blew up the carriage and escaped off the train.

Now the teens are in the middle of the Austrian wilderness with Marco's severed robot head and the stolen Key to Shangri-la. If they can get to the Himalayas alive with that key, they could unlock the greatest mystery of our time - but all these crazed treasure-hunters and the forces of Leviathan are ahead of them.

Roll up identities, secret identities and goals for about 6 passengers, then put them in a list and give each a relationship with the passenger below them. Finally, roll to see which one is killed 1D4 days into the voyage, and again to see who did it. You may also, if you wish, roll for a mystery gimmick.

1. Snake-eye. All water sources within fifty miles have been totally contaminated with snake venom. The natives can drink venom, and they go around with snakes biting onto their chins as ceremonial beards. Outsiders can buy distilled water for extortionate prices.

2. Thief town. Thieves use a massive series of inter-connected water caverns to smuggle goods in and out of the desert. Their beggar king rules them from a massive ruin in a strategically placed cavern. A small town has sprung up on the surface based on the trade below, pretending to be legit.

3. Dahakha. It is illegal to show more than five inches of naked skin - except in the court of law, where it is illegal to wear any clothes. Once a year, everybody goes crazy and the whole town descends into an orgy of sex and violence. No-one mentions it the next day.

4. Empty town - everything still in place from when people lived here. Cactuses grow everywhere where people once stood.

5. Salthaven. Natives walk everywhere on carefully marked pathways, strewn with salt every day. Most keep a satchel with salt on them at all times. Anyone who falls off the pathway while in town is tearfully exiled, and will soon be infested with demons.

6. Knife. Women have no flesh on the ends of their fingers, so their fingers just terminate in little skeleton nubs. Big flesh-eating termite mounds all around town - girls must put fingers in as secret womanhood ritual.

7. Aldivra. Constant red dust storms obscure everything five feet in front of you. All native adults wear white masks in the shape of their spirit animal, believe they are already dead.

8. Monastery town cut in the side of big rock. Peaceful desert monks secretly get drugged up and become crazed Hashshashin's at the behest of their leader - a blind, deaf, dumb old man who weaves his instructions into a tapestry in the inner monk sanctum.

9. Super-advanced dwarven society lives underground to escape heat. Constructed like a series of giant wheels; as you go further up the path of enlightenment, you can live closer and closer to the secret heart of the city.

10. Grave town. Poor rabble live in the massive tombs of some long-forgotten previous civilization.

The ruler of Vornheim is a frost giant queen, trapped high above the city in-between the two hands of Vorn - the twin towers of the Palace Massive and the Eminent Cathedral. She looks down over the city she rules from within the clutches of the two towers that twist around her.

The party called down Vorn to stop this queen and her invading army, but once she was trapped they backflipped and made her the ruler of Vornheim. At that point, zombies were invading, the city was ravaged, and they decided the entire universe was irretrievably fucked. The only solution was to go back in time.

All of the world's problems were caused by the party themselves. To fix the world's problems, all they had to do was kill their very first quest-giver. If old man Crithens hadn't told them about that secret treasure, they wouldn't have become adventurers, and they wouldn't have gone on to ravage the world. Old Man Crithens was the lynchpin of all the world's woes.

With help from their Benefactors, they managed to go back and kill Crithens easily. The betaverse party stayed peacefully in their peasant village. A new timeline - the Betaverse - was split off. Everything was fine. No zombies, no invading elves, no ravaged Vornheim. There was just one fatal flaw: They were still alive.

Matt Groves
karnopticon rewards favour to those who spread disease, right

i'm just thinking

no-one wants me to unleash the flesh plague onto vornheim

i think i might do it secretly anyway

for karnopticon

Jack McNamee

do hooo hooo hoo!

that's kind of a rising intruiged whimsical laugh

Matt Groves

i mean, i dont want to piss everyone off, so can i do this secretlyand does this mean that everyone in vornheim dies

Jack McNamee

It would become a demon city.

You can do this secretly

Jack McNamee

actually, you might need to chat with odermagroth (The skin king, lord of the Flesh Plague) himself

cut a deal for your diety

Matt Groves

first of all, flounder and I enter into the meditative prayer of karnopticon.

Jack McNamee

flounder circles around you in the entwined dance of karnopticon prayer

Jack McNamee

you contact the blight queen

your mind is above a massive, ravaging swarm

that is currently unaware of you

Matt Groves

in the gutteral vocabulary of the insect language, i say to her

"mother"

Jack McNamee

Up it comes!

Matt Groves

"i kill everyone"

"for you"

"you feast on everyone"

"when i am done"

Jack McNamee

The swarm splits away, moments from consuming you

and just seethes over and around you

Matt Groves

"i am your drone"

"you are my queen"

Jack McNamee

Every bug in the swarm lets out a tiny sound

PLEASURE

AND THEN...

Sunday

Matt Groves

i invoke odermagroth using the lesser name that vick discovered

in demonic i say

"khkhkhkhkhkhkhsjsjda, I respectfully seek your consul"

Sunday

Jack McNamee

Several insects twitch and swarm together

Sunday

Jack McNamee

the insects smush together and start bubbling and a long stringy thing starts dripping out

the weird little conjoined mess starts humming around

brushing over the walls and floor

reaches the sealed portal, smooches over it

smooches near flounder, and a spark strikes out

they jerk back

finally they swing around to hover at face height, near you.

The long string of flesh droops out to form a dripping mouth, with sunken eye-sockets

"To what...Hnnguhh... do I owe the pleasure?"

Dealing ensues

Sunday

Jack McNamee

"Alright, hnguh, a third of the souls, and I'll throw in the rulers and clergy. All except the Popess."

Sunday

Matt Groves

"That is acceptable."

Sunday

Jack McNamee

Excellent, excellent

Sunday

Matt Groves

"but for only a third of the souls, my queen will demand the city."

Sunday

Jack McNamee

Surely you jest!

Sunday

Matt Groves

"and she must be allowed to feast on the bodies of the fallen."

Sunday

Jack McNamee

I cannot spare a single body!

Dealing ends.

Sunday

Jack McNamee

1. The drone of karnopticon, Sebastian True Name, will bring the city under control of the flesh plague

2. Karnopticon will recieve 1 third of all souls consumed by the plague, including the nobles and rulers

Sunday

Jack McNamee

3. The Skin King will have these districts, and Karnopticon will have the others. Any being under the jurisdiction of Karnopticon will be instantly struck dead and consumed if it crosses the boundary, and the same for the followers of the Skin King. Neutral parties will be allowed to pass freely

Sunday

Jack McNamee

Conditions 2 and 3 only come into affect if condition 1 is met.

Sunday

Jack McNamee

If any party breaks these rules, his soul will be forfiet to the other party.

4. Followers of Karnopticon will be exempt from the plague.

Sunday

Jack McNamee

5. Karnopticon may consume the dead, all except for the skin, which must remain pure and unbroken.

Sunday

Jack McNamee

6. The Skin King and karnopticon's servants may both use the farmland, provided that they do not molest each other.